Fireflies vs Otter.ai

What Fireflies does

Fireflies is an AI notetaker built for teams, and increasingly for sales teams. Its bot, Fred, joins your Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or Webex calls as a visible participant labeled Fireflies.ai Notetaker, transcribes the conversation, and produces summaries with action items. The company claims 20 million users across more than 500,000 organizations, reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025, and has been profitable since 2023.

Capture goes beyond the bot. A Chrome extension can record Google Meet in real time without sending Fred, mobile and desktop apps handle in-person conversations, dialer integrations cover tools like Aircall and RingCentral, and you can upload audio files (up to 100MB and 150 minutes on the free plan).

On top of the transcripts sit AskFred, an AI chat over your meetings, more than 200 AI Apps for pulling specific things out of calls, Soundbites for clipping moments, and integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Notion, and Asana, plus a public API. The deepest layer, Conversation Intelligence, is an analytics suite gated to the Business plan and above. More on that below.

What Otter.ai does

Otter is the biggest name in the category, with more than 35 million users and roughly $100 million in annual revenue. Its bot, OtterPilot, joins meetings through calendar sync and transcribes live, so you can watch the transcript scroll during the call, something Fireflies does not offer through its bot. Summaries, action items, and Otter AI Chat (question answering across your meeting history) arrive after the call.

The company's 2025-2026 direction is enterprise agents: a Meeting Agent, Sales Agent, SDR Agent, and Recruiting Agent aimed at sales and recruiting orgs. Otter also shipped a public API and MCP server in December 2025, along with a desktop app that can record without sending the bot.

Coverage is narrower than Fireflies: Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, but no Webex and no phone systems. Its mobile apps record in-person conversations, and its accuracy reputation on clear English audio is strong, though like every tool here it degrades with accents and crosstalk.

At a glance

Details checked against both products as of July 2026. Plans and limits shift often, so confirm on each vendor's site before buying.

How they capture your meetings

Both products are bot-led, and that shapes the whole experience. Fred and OtterPilot appear in the participant list, which signals recording but also changes the room: hosts eject bots, IT departments block them, and clients ask what that extra attendee is. Neither bot reliably announces itself. Fireflies leaves the consent notice to host settings, and the 2025 lawsuit against Otter alleges its bot seeks consent only in limited cases.

The complaints the two share are nearly identical. The most common threads on Reddit and Trustpilot for both involve bots joining meetings nobody asked them to join after a calendar connection, and recap emails auto-sent to every attendee, including people outside the company. If you adopt either, turning off auto-join and auto-share should be your first stop in settings.

Escape hatches differ. Otter's is newest: a desktop app added in December 2025 that records without the bot, although the bot remains the default flow. Fireflies has offered botless capture on Google Meet through its Chrome extension for longer, plus uploads and dialer capture, but its core experience is still Fred joining the call.

Free plans and pricing

The free plans are shaped very differently. Fireflies advertises unlimited free transcription, and that part is real. What gets metered is everything around it: a handful of AI summary credits (3 to 10 depending on how you sign up), 20 AI credits a month for AskFred, no transcript downloads, and a storage cap that Fireflies describes inconsistently across its own pages. A recurring Trustpilot complaint is that the free plan feels more limited in practice than the word unlimited suggests.

Otter's free plan is smaller but predictable: 300 transcription minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 3 lifetime file imports, and 20 AI Chat queries. You know exactly when you will hit the wall.

Paid tiers land close together. Fireflies Pro is $10 per seat per month billed annually ($18 monthly) with unlimited summary credits and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat; Business is $19 ($29 monthly) with unlimited storage and Conversation Intelligence; Enterprise is $39, annual only. Otter Pro is $8.33 billed annually ($16.99 monthly) for 1,200 minutes a month; Business is $19.99 ($30 monthly) with unlimited meeting minutes and admin controls; Enterprise is custom, and it is the only tier with Otter's sales coaching. Current numbers live on the Fireflies pricing page and the Otter pricing page.

Languages and transcription

Fireflies transcribes more than 100 languages with auto-detection. Otter's list is far shorter: historically English, French, and Spanish, with German, Japanese, and Mandarin added by 2026 and some availability varying by plan. For a team that runs meetings in Portuguese, Hindi, or Korean, this row alone decides the comparison.

Accuracy claims are similar (Fireflies cites roughly 95 percent), and reviews of both tell the same story: strong on clean single-speaker audio, weaker with heavy accents, crosstalk, and background noise.

Analytics and coaching

Here the gap is real. Fireflies Conversation Intelligence, included with Business at $19, tracks talk-to-listen ratio, filler-word counts, longest monologue, questions asked, silence time, words per minute, and sentiment, with team dashboards where admins can, in Fireflies' own framing, track the performance of each teammate and coach them.

Otter offers much less, gated much higher. Paid plans show a talk-time percentage breakdown per conversation. The genuine coaching features (live prompts, talk-listen ratios, objection tracking) live in the Sales Agent, which requires an Enterprise contract. Otter has no filler-word feedback at any tier; it removes fillers from transcripts rather than reporting them.

Notice who both are built for. These are manager tools: dashboards where a sales lead reviews reps. Whichever you choose, the analytics are read by whoever runs the workspace, not delivered privately to the person who was actually speaking.

Privacy and AI training

The clearest policy difference between the two: Otter trains its models on de-identified customer conversations by default, opt-out rather than opt-in, and a class action filed in August 2025 (Brewer v. Otter.ai) challenges that practice along with the bot's consent behavior. The case was still working through motions in 2026. Fireflies states the opposite default: it does not train AI on customer data, and its model vendors retain data for zero days.

Both companies are SOC 2 Type II certified, both offer HIPAA support on enterprise tiers, and both give workspace admins broad visibility. On Fireflies, a Super Admin can see every recording in the workspace. On Otter Business and Enterprise, admins manage the workspace and conversations can be shared across channels. Worth remembering when the meeting on your calendar is a job interview or a salary conversation.

A different option if the meetings are about you

Everything above compares two tools doing the same job: producing notes and analytics for a team. If a manager wants to search last quarter's calls or coach reps from a dashboard, one of them is the right buy.

Neither is built to answer a more personal question: how did you come across? Fireflies' filler-word counts and sentiment live in team dashboards that admins read. Otter's coaching exists only in an Enterprise sales product pointed at reps. In both, the analytics are about being observed, and nothing in either product helps you privately get better.

Work Coach is built for exactly that. It is a desktop app for Mac (macOS 15+) and Windows 11 that records your meetings locally, with no bot in the participant list, then coaches you privately. It classifies each meeting and your role in it, then scores what matters for that role: STAR answer quality when you are the interviewee, psychological safety when you run a 1:1. It counts your filler words per minute with a deterministic counter and plays each instance back so you hear yourself. It analyzes the audio of your highest-stakes moments for pitch, pace, pauses, projection, and tone. And it generates practice roleplays from your real meetings, so the conversation that went sideways can be rerun tonight.

There is no team workspace, no admin console, and no dashboard a manager can open. Your data is never visible to your employer and never trains shared models. It costs $50 a month after a two-week free trial, priced as coaching (a traditional executive coach runs about $5,000 a month) rather than note-taking. Plenty of people keep Fireflies or Otter for the team record and add Work Coach for the private debrief; it can also import transcripts from either.

Which one should you pick?

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Fireflies or Otter.ai?

It depends on what you need. Fireflies is stronger for multilingual teams (100+ languages), Webex and dialer users, and analytics on a mid-tier budget, since Conversation Intelligence comes with its $19 Business plan. Otter is stronger for live transcription, a predictable free plan, and the lowest paid entry price at $8.33 a month billed annually. On raw note quality for English meetings, most teams would be happy with either.

Is Fireflies really free?

Transcription is free and unlimited, but the parts most people actually want are metered. Free accounts get a small number of AI summary credits, limited AskFred credits, and capped storage, and Fireflies describes the storage limit differently in different places. Reviewers on Trustpilot often say the free plan feels more limited than the word unlimited suggests. Otter's free plan is smaller but simpler: 300 minutes a month with a 30 minute cap per conversation.

Does Otter or Fireflies train AI on your conversations?

Otter trains its models on de-identified customer conversations by default, and a class action filed in 2025 challenges that practice along with how its bot handles recording consent. Fireflies states that it does not train AI on customer data by default and that its model vendors retain data for zero days. If training policy matters to you, this is the clearest difference between the two.

Can Fireflies or Otter record without a bot?

Partly. Otter added bot-free recording to its desktop app in December 2025, and Fireflies has a Chrome extension that can capture Google Meet without sending its bot. In both products the default flow is still a bot that joins through calendar sync and appears in the participant list. Work Coach records locally on your computer with no bot at all.

Is there an alternative to Fireflies and Otter.ai?

For team notes, alternatives include Fathom, Granola, and tl;dv. If what you actually want is feedback on how you come across in meetings, Work Coach is a different category: it records locally with no bot and gives you private coaching, with role-aware scores, filler words per minute, voice delivery analysis, and practice roleplay, for $50 a month after a two-week free trial. Your employer never sees any of it.